Those that love SBI and those that don’t.

So what’s wrong with SBI? Well at first, I didn’t think the price was too high. It was just slightly higher per month than my last webhost… from 2001. So yeah, from a “it’s just webhosting” outlook, it’s way overpriced. Frank’s comments about the one domain thing are really valid. Once you buy your domain, your locked in and there’s no way to test a niche first before committing to the domain. It took me a year of hard work to realize that people are not looking to buy anything in the niche I picked–there are tons of free resources. And despite the fact that SBI analyzes your webpage for seo before you publish them, my niche is very competitive and so after a year and 100 pages, I’m still not in the google top 10. How nice it would be to buy another domain but for $300… I don’t think so. To combat that though, they do have a keyword analysis tool. If you’re totally new to the idea of keywords and niche though, the tool isn’t going to be much use to you because you won’t know how to interpret the data. Personally, I find market samurai to be more useful.

Their forums are a little creepy but that’s been pretty much true for every forum I’ve seen… a bunch of forum old timers are the gods with the new people running around giving them hand-jobs.

The affiliate thing is also sleezy. I mean you’re expected to drop three hundred bucks on this program and when you try to research the program, all you find are a bunch of “site sell is a scam” links that then tell you how great it is. But then again, I’ve seen a lot of affiliate stuff like that.

So while I won’t call SBI a scam, I certainly wouldn’t renew.

Then there is the “cult mentality.” To be fair a lot of products have a cult mentality, but if you have opinions that strongly differ from the “official opinions” it’s probably best not to post them on the forum because many have been banned and lost their SBI sites from that.

While there is some argument over the truth of this accusation and claims that it’s not disagreement but “how” they disagreed, that’s a little too loose and fluid to risk my “business package” on. So what results is the forums tend to have a lot of lurkers, and the participators are people who march in step. But most of them don’t realize that’s how they are coming off.

I find that behavior questionable.

The cult mentality can easily be avoided by just avoiding the forums as much as possible though you usually don’t tell others you’re a part of SBI (hence my “anonymous” name) because of that image.

One point I will argue with you on though is the “only way to make money with SBI is by selling SBI to others.”

I think that’s a big misnomer, though I do wish they would discontinue the affiliate program. Part of what is causing them their PR problems besides the “cultish” replies and how they all rush to defend the product wherever on the internet it’s being criticized, is the affiliate program and how it creates a conflict of interests.

It also creates the misunderstanding that that’s the primary monetization model. It isn’t. Many SBI users (including myself) do NOT sell the SBI site to others through their site. But instead use many other monetization models. I don’t include it because I do feel it’s a conflict of interests and it makes it look like I’m involved in an MLM.

Mostly I try to avoid the forums and avoid the drama of many of the SBI militant users and militant non-users. It’s a useful tool for me at the moment, despite some of it’s failings, but down the road I’ll want to move on to something else, not in small part because of the image of militancy they portray and refusal to really “update” things.

I wrote a detailed review based on my experience: A Negative Review Of Site Build It (SBI)